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The Idea of History

Epilegomena: I: Human Nature and Human History

R. G. Collingwood

MAN, who desires to know everything, desires to know himself. Nor is he only
one (even if, to himself, perhaps the most interesting) among the things he
desires to know. Without some knowledge of himself, his knowledge of other
things is imperfect: for to know something without knowing that one knows it is
only a half-knowing, and to know that one knows is to know oneself.
Self-knowledge is desirable and important to man, not only for its own sake, but
as a condition' without which no other knowledge can be critically justified
and securely based.

Self-knowledge, here, means not knowledge of man's bodily nature, his anatomy
and physiology ; nor even a knowledge of his mind, so far as that consists of
feeling, sensation, and emotion ; but a knowledge of his knowing faculties, his
thought or understanding or reason. How is such knowledge to be attained ?It
seems an easy matter until we think seriously about it ; and then it seems so
difficult that we are tempted to think it impossible. Some have even reinforced
this temptation by argument, urging that the mind, whose business it is to know
other things, has for that very reason no power of knowing itself. But this is
open sophistry: first you say what the mind's nature is, and then you say that
because it has this nature no one can know that it has it. Actually, the
argument is a counsel of despair, based on recognizing that a certain attempted
method of studying the mind has broken down, and on failure to envisage the
possibility of any other.

It seems a fair enough proposal that, in setting out to understand the
nature of our own mind, we should proceed in the same way as when we try to
understand the world about us. In studying the world of nature, we begin by
getting acquainted with the particular things and particular events that exist
and go on there ; then we proceed to understand them, by seeing how they fall
into general types and how these general types are interrelated. These
interrelations we call laws of nature ;

(
205) and it is by ascertaining such laws that we understand the things and
events to which they apply. The same method, it might seem, is applicable to the
problem of understanding mind. Let us begin by observing, as carefully as
possible, the ways in which our own minds and those of others behave under given
circumstances ; then, having become acquainted with these facts of the mental
world, let us try to establish the laws which govern them.

Here is a proposal for a 'science of human nature' whose principles and
methods are conceived on the analogy of those used in the natural sciences. It
is an old proposal, put forward especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, when the principles and methods of natural science had been lately
perfected and were being triumphantly applied to the investigation of the
physical world. When Locke undertook his inquiry into that faculty of
understanding which 'sets Man above the rest of sensible Beings, and gives him
all the Advantage and Dominion which he has over them', the novelty of his
project lay not in his desire for a knowledge of the human mind, but in his
attempt to gain it by methods analogous to those of natural science : the
collection of observed facts and their arrangement in classificatory schemes.
His own description of his method as an 'historical, plain Method' is perhaps
ambiguous ; but his follower Hume was at pains to make it clear that the method
to be followed by the science of human nature was identical with the method of
physical science as he conceived it : its 'only solid foundation', he wrote,
'must be laid on experience and observation'. Reid, in his Inquiry into the
Human Mind, was if possible even more explicit. 'All that we know of the
body, is owing to anatomical dissection and observation, and it must be by an
anatomy of the mind that we can discover its powers and principles.' And from
these pioneers the whole English and Scottish tradition of a 'philosophy of the
human mind' was derived.

Even Kant did not take an essentially different view. He certainly claimed
that his own study of the understanding was something more than empirical ; it
was to be a demonstrative science ; but then he held the same view concerning
the science of nature ; for that also, according to him, has in it an a
priori or demonstrative element, and is not based merely on experience.

It is evident that such a .science of human nature, if it could

(
207) attain even a tolerable approximation to the truth, could hope for
results of extreme importance. As applied to the problems of moral and political
life, for example, its results would certainly be no less spectacular than were
the results of seventeenth-century physics when applied to the mechanical arts
in the eighteenth century. This was fully realized by its promoters. Locke
thought that by its means he could ' prevail with the busy Mind of Man, to be
more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its Comprehension ; to stop,
when it is at the utmost of its Tether ; and to sit down in a quiet Ignorance of
those Things, which, upon Examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our
Capacities'. At the same time, he was convinced that the powers of our
understanding are sufficient for our needs 'in this state', and can give us all
the knowledge we require for 'the comfortable provision for this life, and the
way that leads to a better'. 'If [he concludes] we can find out those Measures,
whereby a Rational creature, put in the state which Man is in this World, may
and ought to govern his Opinions and Actions depending thereon, we need not be
troubled that some other things escape our knowledge.'

Hume is even bolder. "Tis evident'; he writes, 'that all the sciences have a
relation, more or less, to human nature ... since they lie under the cognizance
of men, and are judged of by their powers and faculties. 'Tis impossible to tell
what changes and improvements we might make in these sciences were we thoroughly
acquainted with the extent and force of human understanding.' And in sciences
directly concerned with human nature, like morals and politics, his hopes of a
beneficent revolution are proportionately higher. 'In pretending, therefore, to
explain the principles of human nature, we in effect propose a complete system
of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one
upon which they can stand with any security.' Kant, for all his habitual
caution, claimed no less when he said that his new science would put an end to
all the debates of the philosophical schools, and make it possible to solve all
the problems of metaphysics at once and for ever.

It need not imply any underestimate of what these men actually achieved if we
admit that these hopes were in the main unfulfilled, and that the science of
human nature, from Locke

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208) to the present day, has failed to solve the problem of understanding
what understanding is, and thus giving the human mind knowledge of itself. It
was not through any lack of sympathy with its objects that so judicious a critic
as John Grote found himself obliged to treat the 'philosophy of the human mind'
as a blind alley out of which it was the duty of thought to escape.

What was the reason for this failure? Some might say that it was because the
undertaking was in principle a mistake: mind cannot know itself. This objection
we have already considered. Others, notably the representatives of psychology,
would say that the science of these thinkers was not sufficiently scientific :
psychology was still in its infancy. But if we ask these same men to produce
here and now the practical results for which those early students hoped, they
excuse themselves by saying that psychology is still in its infancy. Here I
think they wrong themselves and their own science. Claiming for it a sphere
which it cannot effectively occupy, they belittle the work it has done and is
doing in its proper field. What that field is, I shall suggest in the sequel.

There remains a third explanation : that the ` science of human nature' broke
down because its method was distorted by the analogy of the natural sciences.
This I believe to be the right one.

It was no doubt inevitable that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
dominated as they were by the new birth of physical science, the eternal problem
of self-knowledge should take shape as the problem of constructing a science of
human nature. To any one reviewing the field of human research, it was evident
that physics stood out as a type of inquiry which had discovered the right
method of investigating its proper object, and it was right that the experiment
should be made of extending this method to every kind of problem. But since then
a great change has come over the intellectual atmosphere of our civilization.
The dominant factor in this change has not been the development of other natural
sciences like chemistry and biology, or the transformation of physics itself
since more began to be known about electricity, or the progressive application
of all these new ideas to manufacture and industry, important though these have
been; for in principle they have done nothing that might not have been foreseen
as implicit in seventeenth

(
209) -century physics itself. The really new element in the thought of
to-day as compared with that of three centuries ago is the rise of history. It
is true that the same Cartesian spirit which did so much for physics was already
laying the foundations of critical method in history before the seventeenth
century was out;[1]
but the modern conception of history as a study at once critical and
constructive, whose field is the human past in its entirety, and whose method is
the reconstruction of that past from documents written and unwritten, critically
analysed and interpreted, was not established until the nineteenth, and is even
yet not fully worked out in all its implications. Thus history occupies in the
world of to-day a position analogous to that occupied by physics in the time of
Locke : it is recognized as a special and autonomous form of thought, lately
established, whose possibilities have not yet been completely explored: And just
as in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were materialists, who
argued from the success of physics in its own sphere that all reality was
physical, so among ourselves the success of history has led some people to
suggest that its methods are applicable to all the problems of knowledge, in
other words, that all reality is historical.

This I believe to be an error. I think that those who assert it are making a
mistake of the same kind which the materialists made in the seventeenth century.
But I believe, and in this essay I shall try to show, that there is at least one
important element of truth in what they say. The thesis which I shall maintain
is that the science of human nature was a false attempt—falsified by the analogy
of natural science—to understand the mind itself, and that, whereas the right
way of investigating nature is by the methods called scientific, the right way
of investigating mind is by the methods of history. I shall contend that the
work which was to be done by the science of human nature is actually done, and
can only be done, by history: that history is what the science of human nature
professed to be, and that Locke was right when he said (however little he
understood what he was saying) that the right method for such an inquiry is the
historical, plain method.

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210)

(ii) The field of historical thought[2]

I must begin by attempting to delimit the proper sphere of historical
knowledge as against those who, maintaining the historicity of all things, would
resolve all knowledge into historical knowledge. Their argument runs in some
such way as this.

The methods of historical research have, no doubt, been developed in
application to the history of human affairs: but is that the limit of their
applicability ? They have already before now undergone important extensions: for
example, at one time historians had worked out their methods of critical
interpretation only as applied to written sources containing narrative material,
and it was a new thing when they learnt to apply them to the unwritten data
provided by archaeology. Might not a similar but even more revolutionary
extension sweep into the historian's net the entire world of nature? In other
words, are not natural processes really historical processes, and is not the
being of nature an historical being?

Since the time of Heraclitus and Plato, it has been a common-place that
things natural, no less than things human, are in constant change, and that the
entire world of nature is a world of 'process' or 'becoming. But this is not
what is meant by the historicity of things ; for change and history are not at
all the same. According to this old-established conception, the specific forms
of natural things constitute a changeless repertoryof fixed types, and the
process of nature is a process by which instances of these forms (or
quasi-instances of them, things approximating to the embodiment of them) come
into existence and pass out of it again. Now in human affairs, as historical
research had clearly demonstrated by the eighteenth century, there is no such
fixed repertory of specific forms. Here, the process of becoming was already by
that time recognized as involving not only the instances or quasi-instances of
the forms, but the forms themselves. The political philosophy of Plato
andAristotle teaches in effect that city-states come and go, but the

(
211) idea of the city-state remains for ever as the one social and political
form towards whose realization human intellect, so far as it is really
intelligent, strives. According to modern ideas, the city-state itself is as
transitory a thing as Miletus or Sybaris. It is not an eternal ideal, it was
merely the political ideal of the ancient Greeks. Other civilizations have had
before them other political ideals, and human history shows a change not only in
the individual cases in which these ideals are realized or partially realized,
but in the ideals themselves. Specific types of human organization, the
city-state, the feudal system, representative government, capitalistic industry,
are characteristic of certain historical ages.

At first, this transience of specific forms was imagined to be a peculiarity
of human life. When Hegel said that nature has no history, he meant that whereas
the specific forms of human organization change as time goes on, the forms of
natural organization do not. There is, he grants, a distinction of higher and
lower in the specific forms of nature, and the higher forms are a development
out of the lower ; but this development is only a logical one, not a temporal,
and in time all the 'strata' of nature exist simultaneously.[3]
But this view of nature has been overthrown by the doctrine of evolution.
Biology has decided that living organisms are not divided into kinds each
permanently distinct from the rest, but have developed their present specific
forms through a process of evolution in time. Nor is this conception limited to
the field of biology. It appeared simultaneously, the two applications being
closely connected through the study of fossils, in geology. To-day even the
stars are divided into kinds which can 'be described as older and younger ; and
the specific forms of matter, no longer conceived in the Daltonian manner, as
elements eternally distinct like the living species of pre-Darwinian biology,
are regarded as subject to a similar change, so that the chemical constitution
of our present world is only a phase in a process leading from a very different
past to a very different future.

This evolutionary conception of nature, whose implications have been
impressively worked out by philosophers like M. Bergson, Mr. Alexander, and Mr.
Whitehead, might seem at first

(212) sight to have abolished the
difference between natural process and historical process, and to have resolved
nature into history. And if a further step in the same resolution were needed,
it might seem to be provided by Mr. Whitehead's doctrine that the very
possession of its attributes by a natural thing takes time. Just as Aristotle
argued that a man cannot be happy at an instant, but that the possession of
happiness takes a lifetime, so Mr. Whitehead argues that to be an atom of
hydrogen takes time—the time necessary for establishing the peculiar rhythm of
movements which distinguishes it from other atoms—so that there is no such thing
as 'nature at an instant'.

These modern views of nature do, no doubt, ' take time seriously'. But just
as history is not the same thing as change, so it is not the same thing as '
timefulness', whether that means evolution or an existence which takes time.
Such views have certainly narrowed the gulf between nature and history of which
early nineteenth-century thinkers were so conscious ; they have made it
impossible to state the distinction any longer in the way in which Hegel stated
it ; but in order to decide whether the gulf has been really closed and the
distinction annulled, we must turn to the conception of history and see whether
it coincides in essentials with this modern conception of nature.

If we put this question to the ordinary historian, he will answer it in the
negative. According to him, all history properly so called is the history of
human affairs. His special technique, depending as it does on the interpretation
of documents in which human beings of the past have expressed or betrayed their
thoughts, cannot be applied just as it stands to the study of natural processes
; and the more this technique is elaborated in its details, the farther it is
from being so applicable. There is a certain analogy between the archaeologist's
interpretation of a stratified site and the geologist's interpretation of
rock-horizons with their associated fossils ; but the difference is no less
clear than the similarity. The archaeologist's use of his stratified relics
depends on his conceiving them as artifacts serving human purposes and thus
expressing a particular way in which men have thought about their own life ; and
from his point of view the palaeontologist, arranging his fossils in a
time-series, is not working as an historian, but only as a scientist thinking in
a way which can at most be described as quasi-historical.

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213)

Upholders of the doctrine under examination would say that here the historian
is making an arbitrary distinction between things that are really the same, and
that his conception of history is an unphilosophically narrow one, restricted by
the imperfect development of his technique ; very much as some historians,
because their equipment was inadequate to studying the historyof art or science
or economic life, have mistakenly restricted the field of historical thought to
the history of politics. The question must therefore be raised, why do
historians habitually identify history with the history of human affairs ? In
order to answer this question, it is not enough to consider the characteristics
of historical method as it actually exists, for the question at issue is
whether, as it actually exists, it covers the whole field which properly belongs
to it. We must ask what is the general nature of the problems which this method
is designed to solve. When we have done so, it will appear that the special
problem of the historian is one which does not arise in the case of natural
science.

The historian, investigating any event in the past, makes a distinction
between what may be called the outside and the inside of an event. By the
outside of the event I mean everything belonging to it which can be described
in terms of bodies and their movements : the passage of Caesar, accompanied by
certain men, across a river called the Rubicon at one date, or the spilling of
his blood on the floor of the senate-house at another. By the inside of the
event I mean that in it which can only be described in terms of thought :
Caesar's defiance of Republican law, or the clash of constitutional policy
between himself and his assassins. The historian is never concerned with either
of these to the exclusion of the other. He is investigating not mere events
(where by a mere event I mean one which has only an outside and no inside) but
actions, and an action is the unity of the outside and inside of an event. He is
interested in the crossing of the Rubicon only in its relation to Republican
law, and in the spilling of Caesar's blood only in its relation to a
constitutional conflict. His work may begin by discovering the outside of an
event, but it can never end there ; he must always remember that the event was
an action, and that his main task is to think himself into this action, to
discern the thought of its agent.

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214)

In the case of nature, this distinction between the outside and the inside of
an event does not arise. The events of nature are mere events, not the acts of
agents whose thought the scientist endeavours to trace. It is true that the
scientist, like the historian, has to go beyond the mere discovery of events ;
but the direction in which he moves is very different. Instead of conceiving the
event as an action and attempting to rediscover the thought of its agent,
penetrating from the outside of the event to its inside, the scientist goes
beyond the event, observes its relation to others, and thus brings it under a
general formula or law of nature. To the scientist, nature is always and merely
a `phenomenon', not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense
of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation ; whereas the
events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for
contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to
discern the thought within them.

In thus penetrating to the inside of events and detecting the thought which
they express, the historian is doing something which the scientist need not and
cannot do. In this way the task of the historian is more complex than that of
the scientist. In another way it is simpler: the historian need not and cannot
(without ceasing to be an historian) emulate the scientist in searching for the
causes or laws of events. For science, the event is discovered by perceiving it,
and the further search for its cause is conducted by assigning it to its class
and determining the relation between that class and others. For history, the
object to be discovered is not the mere event, but the thought expressed in it.
To discover that thought is already to understand it. After the historian has
ascertained the facts, there is no further process of inquiring into their
causes. When he knows what happened, he already knows why it happened.

This does not mean that words like 'cause' are necessarily out of place in
reference to history ; it only means that they are used there in a special
sense. When a scientist asks 'Why did that piece of litmus paper turn pink ? '
he means ' On what kinds of occasions do pieces of litmus paper turn pink?' When
an historian asks 'Why did Brutus .stab Caesar ? ' he means 'What did Brutus
think, which made him decide to stab Caesar ? ' The cause of the event, for him,
means the thought in the mind of

(
215) the person by whose agency the event came about : and this is not
something other than the event, it is the inside of the event itself.

The processes of nature can therefore be properly described as sequences of
mere events, but those of history cannot. They are not processes of mere events
but processes of actions, which have an inner side, consisting of processes of
thought ; and what the historian is looking for is these processes of thought.
All history is the history of thought.

But how does the historian discern the thoughts which he is trying to
discover? There is only one way in which it can be done: by rethinking them in
his own mind. The historian of philosophy, reading Plato, is trying to know what
Plato thought when he expressed himself in certain words. The only way in which
he can do this is by thinking it for himself. This, in fact, is what we mean
when we speak of 'understanding' the words. So the historian of politics or
warfare, presented with an account of certain actions done by Julius Caesar,
tries to understand these actions, that is, to discover what thoughts in
Caesar's mind determined him to do them. This implies envisaging for himself the
situation in which Caesar stood, and thinking for himself what Caesar thought
about the situation and the possible ways of dealing with it. The history of
thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the
historian's own mind.

This re-enactment is only accomplished, in the case of Plato and Caesar
respectively, so far as the historian brings to bear on the problem all the
powers of his own mind and all his knowledge of philosophy and politics. It is
not a passive surrender to the spell of another's mind ; it is a labour of
active and therefore critical thinking. The historian not only re-enacts past
thought, he re-enacts it in the context of his own knowledge and therefore, in
re-enacting it, criticizes it, forms his own judgment of its value, corrects
whatever errors he can discern in it. This criticism of the thought whose
history he traces is not something secondary to tracing the history of it. It is
an indispensable condition of the historical knowledge itself. Nothing could be
a completer error concerning the history of thought than to suppose that the
historian as such merely ascertains 'what so-and-so thought', leaving it to some
one else

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216) to decide ` whether it was true'. All thinking is critical thinking ;
the thought which re-enacts past thoughts, therefore, criticizes them in
re-enacting them.

It is now clear why historians habitually restrict the field of historical
knowledge to human affairs. A natural process is a process of events, an
historical' process is a process of thoughts. Man is regarded as the only
subject of historical process, because man is regarded as the only animal that
thinks, or thinks enough, and clearly enough, to render his actions the
expressions of his thoughts. The belief that man is the only animal that thinks
at all is no doubt a superstition ; but the belief that man thinks more, and
more continuously and effectively, than any other animal, and is the only animal
whose conduct is to any great extent determined by thought instead of by mere
impulse and appetite, is probably well enough founded to justify the historian's
rule of thumb.

It does not follow that all human actions are subject-matter for history; and
indeed historians are agreed that they are not. But when they are asked how the
distinction is to be made between historical and non-historical human actions,
they are somewhat at a loss how to reply. From our present point of view we can
offer an answer: so far as man's conduct is determined by what may be called
his animal nature, his impulses and appetites, it is non-historical ; the
process of those activities is a natural process. Thus, the historian is not
interested in the fact that men eat and sleep and make love and thus satisfy
their natural appetites ; but he is interested in the social customs which they
create by their thought as a framework within which these appetites find
satisfaction in ways sanctioned by convention and morality.

Consequently, although the conception of evolution has revolutionized our
idea of nature by substituting for the old conception of natural process as a
change within the limits of a fixed system of specific forms the new conception
of that process as involving a change in these forms themselves, it has by no
means identified the idea of natural process with that of historical process ;
and the fashion, current not long ago, of using the word ` evolution' in an
historical context, and talking of the evolution of parliament or the like,
though natural in an age when the science of nature was regarded as the only
true form of

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217) knowledge, and when other forms of knowledge, in order to justify their
existence, felt bound to assimilate themselves to that model, was the result of
confused thinking and a source of further confusions.

There is only one hypothesis on which natural processes could be regarded as
ultimately historical in character: namely, that these processes are in reality
processes of action determined by a thought which is their own inner side. This
would imply that natural events are expressions of thoughts, whether the
thoughts of God, or of angelic or demonic finite intelligences, or of minds
somewhat like our own inhabiting the organic and inorganic bodies of nature as
our minds inhabit our bodies. Setting aside mere flights of metaphysical fancy,
such an hypothesis could claim our serious attention only if it led to a better
understanding of the natural world. In fact, however, the scientist can
reasonably say of it `je n'ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse', and the
theologian will recoil from any suggestion that God's action in the natural
world resembles the action of a finite human mind under the conditions of
historical life. This at least is certain : that, so far as our scientific and
historical knowledge goes, the processes of events which constitute the world of
nature are altogether different in kind from the processes of thought which
constitute the world of history.

(iii) History as knowledge of mind

History, then, is not, as it has so often been mis-described, a story of
successive events or an account of change. Unlike the natural scientist, the
historian is not concerned with events as such at all. He is only concerned with
those events which are the outward expression of thoughts, and is only concerned
with these in so far as they express thoughts. At bottom, he is concerned with
thoughts alone ; with their outward expression in events he is concerned only by
the way, in so far as these reveal to him the thoughts of which he is in search.

In a sense, these thoughts are no doubt themselves events happening in time ;
but since the only way in which the historian can discern them is by re-thinking
them for himself, there is another sense, and one very important to the
historian, in which they are not in time at all. If the discovery of Pythagoras
concerning the square on the hypotenuse is a thought which we

(
218) to-day can think for ourselves, a thought that constitutes a permanent
addition to mathematical knowledge, the discovery of Augustus, that a monarchy
could be grafted upon the Republican constitution of Rome by developing the
implications of proconsulare imperium and tribunicia potestas, is
equally a thought which the student of Roman history can think for himself, a
permanent addition to political ideas. If Mr. Whitehead is justified in calling
the right-angled triangle an eternal object, the same phrase is applicable to
the Roman constitution and the Augustan modification of it. This is an eternal
object because it can be apprehended by historical thought at any time ; time
makes no difference to it in this respect, just as it makes no difference to the
triangle. The peculiarity which makes it historical is not the fact of its
happening in time, but the fact of its becoming known to us by our rethinking
the same thought which created the situation we are investigating, and thus
coming to understand that situation.

Historical knowledge is the knowledge of what mind has done in the past, and
at the same time it is the redoing of this, the perpetuation of past acts in the
present. Its object is therefore not a mere object, something outside the mind
which knows it ; it is an activity of thought, which can be known only in so far
as the knowing mind re-enacts it and knows itself as so doing. To the historian,
the activities whose history he is studying are not spectacles to be watched,
but experiences to be lived through in his own mind; they are objective, or
known to him, only because they are also subjective, or activities of his own.

It may thus be said that historical inquiry reveals to the historian the
powers of his own mind. Since all he can know historically is thoughts that he
can re-think for himself, the fact of his coming to know them shows him that his
mind is able (or by the very effort of studying them has become able) to think
in these ways. And conversely, whenever he finds certain historical matters
unintelligible, he has discovered a limitation of his own mind ; he has
discovered that there are certain ways in which he is not, or no longer, or not
yet, able to think. Certain historians, sometimes whole generations of
historians, find in certain periods of history nothing intelligible, and call
them dark ages ; but such phrases tell us nothing about those ages themselves,
though they tell us a great deal about the persons who

(
219) use them, namely that they are unable to re-think the thoughts which
were fundamental to their life. It has been said that die Weltgeschichte ist
das Weltgericht ; and it is true, but in a sense not always recognized. It
is the historian himself who stands at the bar of judgement, and there reveals
his own mind in its strength and weakness, its virtues and its vices.

But historical knowledge is not concerned only with a remote past. If it is
by historical thinking that we re-think and so rediscover the thought of
Hammurabi or Solon, it is in the same way that we discover the thought of a
friend who writes us a letter, or a stranger who crosses the street. Noris
it necessary that the historian should be one person and the subject of his
inquiry another. It is only by historical thinking that I can discover what I
thought ten years ago, by reading what I then wrote, or what I thought five
minutes ago, by reflecting on an action that I then did, which surprised me when
I realized what I had done. In this sense, all knowledge of mind is historical.
The only way in which I can know my own mind is by performing some mental act or
other and then considering what the act is that I have performed. If I want to
know what I think about a certain subject, I try to put my ideas about it in
order, on paper or otherwise; and then, having thus arranged and formulated
them, I can study the result as an historical document and see what my ideas
were when I did that piece of thinking: if I am dissatisfied with them, I can do
it over again. If I want to know what powers my mind possesses as yet
unexplored, for example, whether I can write poetry, I must try to write some,
and see whether it strikes me and others as being the real thing. If I want to
know whether I am as good a man as I hope, or as bad as I fear, I must examine
acts that I have done, and understand what they really were : or else go and do
some fresh acts and then examine those. All these inquiries are historical. They
proceed by studying accomplished facts, ideas that I have thought out and
expressed, acts that I have done. On what I have only begun and am still doing,
no judgement can as yet be passed.

The same historical method is the only one by which I can know the mind of
another, or the corporate mind (whatever exactly that phrase means) of a
community or an age. To study the mind of the Victorian age or the English
political spirit is

(
220) simply to study the history of Victorian thought or English political
activity. Here we come back to Locke and his 'historical, plain Method'. Mind
not only declares, but also enjoys or possesses, its nature, both as mind in
general and as this particular sort of mind with these particular dispositions
and faculties, by thinking and acting, doing individual actions which express
individual thoughts. If historical thinking is the way in which these thoughts
are detected as expressed in these actions, it would seem that Locke's phrase
hits the truth, and that historical knowledge is the only knowledge that the
human mind can have of itself. The so-called science of human nature or of the
human mind resolves itself into history.

It will certainly be thought (if those who think in this way have had
patience to follow me thus far) that in saying this I am claiming more for
history than it can ever give. The false view of history as a story of
successive events or a spectacle of changes has been so often and so
authoritatively taught in late years, especially in this country, that the very
meaning of the word has become debauched through the assimilation of historical
process to natural process. Against misunderstandings arising from this source I
am bound to protest, even if I protest in vain. But there is one sense in which
I should agree that the resolution of a science of mind into history means
renouncing part of what a science of mind commonly claims, and, I think, claims
falsely. The mental scientist, believing in the universal and therefore
unalterable truth of his conclusions, thinks that the account he gives of mind
holds good of all future stages in mind's history: he thinks that his science
shows what mind will always be, not only what it has been in the past and is
now. The historian has no gift of prophecy, and knows it ; the historical study
of mind, therefore, can neither foretell the future developments of human
thought nor legislate for them, except so far as they must proceed—though in
what direction we cannot tell—from the present as their starting-point. Not the
least of the errors contained in the science of human nature is its claim to
establish a framework to which all future history must conform, to close the
gates of the future and bind posterity within limits due not to the nature of
things (limits of that kind are real, and are easily accepted) but to the
supposed laws of the mind itself.

(
221)

Another type of objection deserves longer consideration. It may be granted
that mind is the proper and only object of historical knowledge, but it may
still be contended that historical knowledge is not the only way in which mind
can be known. There might be a distinction between two ways of knowing mind.
Historical thought studies mind as acting in certain determinate ways in certain
determinate situations. Might there not be another way of studying mind,
investigating its general characteristics in abstraction from any particular
situation or particular action ? If so, this would be a scientific, as opposed
to an historical, knowledge of mind: not history, but mental science,
psychology, or the philosophy of mind.

If such a science of mind is to be distinguished from history, how is the
relation between the two to be conceived ? It seems to me that two alternative
views of this relation are possible.

One way of conceiving it would be to distinguish between what mind is and
what it does : and to entrust the study of what it does, its particular actions,
to history, and reserve the study of what it is for mental science. To use a
familiar distinction, its functions depend on its structure, and behind its
functions or particular activities as revealed in history there lies a structure
which determines these functions, and must be studied not by history but by
another kind of thought.

This conception, however, is very confused. In the case of a machine, we
distinguish structure from function, and think of the latter as depending on the
former. But we can do this only because the machine is equally perceptible to us
in motion or at rest, and we can therefore study it in either state
indifferently. But any study of mind is a study of its activities ; if we try to
think of a mind absolutely at rest, we are compelled to admit that if it existed
at all (which is more than doubtful) at least we should be quite unable to study
it. Psychologists speak of mental mechanisms ; but they are speaking not of
structures but of functions. They do not profess ability to observe these
so-called mechanisms when they are not functioning. And if we look closer at the
original distinction we shall see that it does not mean quite what it seems to
mean. In the case of a machine, what we call function is really only that part
of the machine's total functioning which serves the purpose of its maker or
user. Bicycles are made not in order that there may be bicycles, but

(
222) in order that people may travel in a certain way. Relatively to that
purpose, a bicycle is functioning only when some one is riding it. But a bicycle
at rest in a shed is not ceasing to function: its parts are not inactive, they
are holding themselves together in a particular order ; and what we call
possession of its structure is nothing but this function of holding itself thus
together. In this sense, whatever is called structure is in reality a way of
functioning. In any other sense, mind has no function at all ; it has no value,
to itself or to any one else, except to be a mind, to perform those activities
which constitute it a mind. Hume was therefore right to maintain that there is
no such thing as 'spiritual substance', nothing that a mind is, distinct from
and underlying what it does.

This idea of a mental science would be, to use Comte's famous distinction,
'metaphysical', depending on the conception of an occult substance underlying
the facts of historical activity ; the alternative idea would be 'positive',
depending on the conception of similarities or uniformities among those facts
themselves. According to this idea, the task of mental science would be to
detect types or patterns of activity, repeated over and over again in history
itself.

That such a science is possible is beyond question. But two observations must
be made about it.

First, any estimate of the value of such a science, based on the analogy of
natural science, is wholly misleading. The value of generalization in natural
science depends on the fact that the data of physical science are given by
perception, and perceiving is not understanding. The raw material of natural
science is therefore 'mere particulars', observed but not understood, and, taken
in their perceived particularity, unintelligible. It is therefore a genuine
advance in knowledge to discover something intelligible in the relations between
general types of them. What they are in themselves, as scientists are never
tired of reminding us, remains unknown : but we can at least know something
about the patterns of facts into which they enter.

A science which generalizes from historical facts is in a very different
position. Here the facts, in order to serve as data, must first be historically
known ; and historical knowledge is not perception, it is the discerning of the
thought which is the inner side of the event. The historian, when he is ready to
hand

(
223) over such a fact to the mental scientist as a datum for generalization,
has already understood it in this way from within. If he has not done so, the
fact is being used as a datum for generalization before it has been properly '
ascertained'. But if he has done so, nothing of value is left for generalization
to do. If, by historical thinking, we already understand how and why Napoleon
established his ascendancy in revolutionary France, nothing is added to our
understanding of that process by the statement (however true) that similar
things have happened elsewhere. It is only when the particular fact cannot be
understood by itself that such statements are of value.

Hence the idea that such a science is valuable depends on a tacit and false
assumption that the 'historical data', 'phenomena of consciousness', or the like
upon which it is based are merely perceived and not historically known. To think
that they can be thus merely perceived is to think of them not as mind but as
nature ; and consequently sciences of this type tend systematically to
dementalize mind and convert it into nature. Modern examples are the
pseudo-history of Spengler, where the individual historical facts which he calls
'cultures' are frankly conceived as natural products, growing and perishing
'with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field', and the many
psychological theories now fashionable, which conceive virtues and vices,
knowledge and illusion, in the same way.

Secondly, if we ask how far the generalizations of such a science hold good,
we shall see that its claim to transcend they sphere of history is baseless.
Types of behaviour do, no doubt, recur, so long as minds of the same kind are
placed in the same kind of situations. The behaviour-patterns characteristic of
a feudal baron were no doubt fairly constant so long as there were feudal barons
living in a feudal society. But they will be sought in vain (except by an
inquirer content with the loosest and most fanciful analogies) in a world whose
social structure is of another kind. In order that behaviour-patterns may be
constant, there must be in existence a social order which recurrently produces
situations of a certain kind. But social orders are historical facts, and
subject to inevitable changes, fast or slow. A positive science of mind will, no
doubt, be able to establish uniformities and recurrences, but it can have no
guarantee that the laws it establishes will hold good beyond the historical
period from

(
224) which its facts are drawn. Such a science (as we have lately been
taught with regard to what is called classical economics) can do no more than
describe in a general way certain characteristics of the historical age in which
it is constructed. If it tries to overcome this limitation by drawing on a wider
field, relying on ancient history, modern anthropology, and so on, for a larger
basis of facts, it will still never be more than a generalized description of
certain phases in human history. It will never be a non-historical science of
mind.

To regard such a positive mental science as rising above the sphere of
history, and establishing the permanent and unchanging laws of human nature, is
therefore possible only to a person who mistakes the transient conditions of a
certain historical age for the permanent conditions of human life. It was easy
for men of the eighteenth century to make this mistake, because their historical
perspective was so short, and their knowledge of cultures other than their own
so limited, that they could cheerfully identify the intellectual habits of a
western European in their own day with the intellectual faculties bestowed by
God upon Adam and all his progeny. Hume, in his account of human nature, never
attempted to go beyond observing that in point of fact ' we' think in certain
ways, and left undiscussed the question what he meant by the word ` we'. Even
Kant, in his attempt to go beyond the 'question of fact' and settle the
'question of right', only showed that we must think in these ways if we are to
possess the kind of science which we actually possess. When he asks how
experience is possible, he means by experience the kind of experience enjoyed by
men of his own age and civilization. He was, of course, not aware of this. No
one in his time had done enough work on the history of thought to know that both
the science and the experience of an eighteenth-century European were highly
peculiar historical facts, very different from those of other peoples and other
times. Nor was it yet realized that, even apart from the evidence of history,
men must have thought in very different ways when as yet they were hardly
emerged from the ape. The idea of a science of human nature, as entertained in
the eighteenth century, belonged to a time when it was still believed that the
human species, like every other, was a special creation with unalterable
characteristics.

The fallacy inherent in the very idea of a science of human

(
225) nature is not removed by pointing out that human nature, like every
kind of nature, must according to the principles of modern thought be conceived
as subject to evolution. Indeed, such a modification of the idea only leads to
worse consequences. Evolution, after all, is a natural process, a process of
change ; and as such it abolishes one specific form in creating another. The
trilobites of the Silurian age may be the ancestors of the mammals of to-day,
including ourselves ; but a human being is not a kind of wood-louse. The past,
in a natural process, is a past superseded and dead. Now suppose the historical
process of human thought were in this sense an evolutionary process. It would
follow that the ways of thinking characteristic of any given historical period
are ways in which people must think then, but in which others, cast at different
times in a different mental mould, cannot think at all. If that were the case,
there would be no such thing as truth: according to the inference correctly
drawn by Herbert Spencer, what we take for knowledge is merely the fashion of
present-day thought, not true but at the most useful in our struggle for
existence. The same evolutionary view of the history of thought is implied by
Mr. Santayana, when he denounces history as fostering 'the learned illusion of
living again the life of the dead', a subject fit only for 'minds fundamentally
without loyalties and incapable or fearful of knowing themselves'; persons
interested not in 'the rediscovery of an essence formerly discovered or prized',
but only in 'the fact that people once entertained some such idea'.[4]

The fallacy common to these views is the confusion between a natural process,
in which the past dies in being replaced by the present, and an historical
process, in which the past, so far as it is historically known, survives in the
present. Oswald Spengler, vividly realizing the difference between modern
mathematics and that of the Greeks, and knowing that each is a function of its
own historical age, correctly argues from his false identification of historical
with natural process that to us Greek mathematics must be not only strange but
unintelligible. But in fact, not only do we understand Greek mathematics easily
enough, it is actually the foundation of our own. It is not the dead past of a
mathematical thought once entertained by persons whose names and dates we can
give, it is the living past

(
226) of our own present mathematical inquiries, a past which, so far as we
take any interest in mathematics, we still enjoy as an actual possession.
Because the historical past, unlike the natural past, is a living past, kept
alive by the act of historical thinking itself, the historical change from one
way of thinking to another is not the death of the first, but its survival
integrated in a new context involving the development and criticism of its own
ideas. Mr. Santayana, like so many others, first wrongly identifies historical
process with natural process, and then blames history for being what he falsely
thinks it to be. Spencer's theory of the evolution of human ideas embodies the
error in its crudest form.

Man has been defined as an animal capable of profiting by the experience of
others. Of his bodily life this would be wholly untrue: he is not nourished
because another has eaten, or refreshed because another has slept. But as
regards his mental life it is true ; and the way in which this profit is
realized is by historical knowledge. The body of human thought or mental
activity is a corporate possession, and almost all the operations which our
minds perform are operations which we learned to perform from others who have
performed them already. Since mind is what it does, and human nature, if it is a
name for anything real, is only a name for human activities, this acquisition
of ability to perform determinate operations is the acquisition of a determinate
human nature. Thus the historical process is a process in which man creates for
himself this or that kind of human nature by re-creating in his own thought the
past to which he is heir.

This inheritance is not transmitted by any natural process. To be possessed,
it must be grasped by the mind that possesses it, and historical knowledge is
the way in which we enter upon the possession of it. There is not, first, a
special kind of process, the historical process, and then a special way of
knowing this, namely historical thought. The historical process is itself a
process of thought, and it exists only in so far as the minds which are parts of
it know themselves for parts of it. By historical thinking, the mind whose
self-knowledge is history not only discovers within itself those powers of which
historical thought reveals the possession, but actually develops those powers
from a latent to an actual state, brings them into effective existence.

(
227)

It would therefore be sophistical to argue that, since the historical process
is a process of thought, there must be thought already present, as its
presupposition, at the beginning of it, and that an account of what thought is,
originally and in itself, must be a non-historical account. History does not
presuppose mind; it is the life of mind itself, which is not mind except so far
as it both lives in historical process and knows itself as so living.

The idea that man, apart from his self-conscious historical life, is
different from the rest of creation in being a rational animal is a mere
superstition. It is only by fits and starts, in a flickering and dubious manner,
that human beings are rational at all. In quality, as well as in amount, their
rationality is a matter of degree: some are oftener rational than others, some
rational in a more intense way. But a flickering and dubious rationality can
certainly not be denied to animals other than men. Their minds may be inferior
in range and power to those of the lowest savages, but by the same standards the
lowest savages are inferior to civilized men, and those whom we call civilized
differ among themselves hardly less. There are even among non-human animals the
beginnings of historical life: for example, among cats, which do not wash by
instinct but are taught by their mothers. Such rudiments of education are
something not essentially different from an historic culture.

Historicity, too, is a matter of degree. The historicity of very primitive
societies is not easily distinguishable from the merely instinctive life of
societies in which rationality is at vanishing-point. When the occasions on
which thinking is done, and the kinds of things about which it is done, become
more frequent and more essential to the life of society, the historic
inheritance of thought, preserved by historical knowledge of what has been
thought before, becomes more considerable, and with its development the
development of a specifically rational life begins.

Thought is therefore not the presupposition of an historical process which is
in turn the presupposition of historical knowledge. It is only in the
historical process, the process of thoughts, that thought exists at all ; and it
is only in so far as this process is known for a process of thoughts that it is
one. The self-knowledge of reason is not an accident ; it belongs to its
essence. This is why historical knowledge is no luxury, or mere amusement

(
228) of a mind at leisure from more pressing occupations, but a prime duty,
whose discharge is essential to the maintenance, not only of any particular form
or type of reason, but of reason itself.

(iv) Conclusions

It remains to draw a few conclusions from the thesis I have tried to
maintain.

First, as regards history itself. The methods of modern historical inquiry
have grown up under the shadow of their elder sister, the method of natural
science; in some ways helped by its example, in other ways hindered. Throughout
this essay it has been necessary to engage in a running fight with what may be
called a positivistic conception, or rather misconception, of history, as the
study of successive events lying in a dead past, events to be understood as the
scientist understands natural events, by classifying them and establishing
relations between the classes thus defined. This misconception is not only an
endemic error in modern philosophical thought about history, it is also a
constant peril to historical thought itself. So far as historians yield to it,
they neglect their proper task of penetrating to the thought of the agents whose
acts they are studying, and content themselves with determining the externals of
these acts, the kind of things about them which can be studied statistically.
Statistical research is for the historian a good servant but a bad master. It
profits him nothing to make statistical generalizations, unless he can thereby
detect the thought behind the facts about which he is generalizing. At the
present day, historical thought is almost everywhere disentangling itself from
the toils of the positivistic fallacy, and recognizing that in itself history is
nothing but the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's mind ; but much
still needs to be done if the full fruits of this recognition are to be reaped.
All kinds of historical fallacies are still current, due to confusion between
historical process and natural process: not only the cruder fallacies of
mistaking historical facts of culture and tradition for functions of biological
facts like race and pedigree, but subtler fallacies affecting methods of
research and the organization of historical inquiry, which it would take too
long to enumerate here. It is not until these have been eradicated that we can
see how far

(
229) historical thought, attaining at last its proper shape and stature, is
able to make good the claims long ago put forward on behalf of the science of
human nature.

Secondly, with regard to past attempts to construct such a science:

The positive function of so-called sciences of the human mind, whether total
or partial (I refer to such studies as those on the theory of knowledge, of
morals, of politics, of economics, and so forth), has always tended to be
misconceived. Ideally, they are designed as accounts of one unchanging
subject-matter, the mind of man as it always has been and always will be. Little
acquaintance with them is demanded in order to see that they are nothing of the
sort, but only inventories of the wealth achieved by the human mind at a certain
stage in its history. The Republic of Plato is an account, not of the
unchanging ideal of political life, but of the Greek ideal as Plato received it
and re-interpreted it. The Ethics of Aristotle describes not an eternal
morality but the morality of the Greek gentleman. Hobbes's Leviathan
expounds the political ideas of seventeenth-century absolutism in their English
form. Kant's ethical theory expresses the moral convictions of German pietism ;
his Critique of Pure Reason analyses the conceptions and principles. of
Newtonian science, in their relation to the philosophical problems of the day.
These limitations are often taken for defects, as if a more powerful thinker
than Plato would have lifted himself clean out of the atmosphere of Greek
politics, or as if Aristotle ought to have anticipated the moral conceptions of
Christianity or the modern world. So far from being a defect, they are a sign of
merit ; they are most clearly to be seen in those works whose quality is of the
best. The reason is that in those works the authors are doing best the only
thing that can be done when an attempt is made to construct a science of the
human mind. They are expounding the position reached by the human mind in its
historical development down to their own time.

When they try to justify that position, all they can do is to exhibit it as a
logical one, a coherent whole of ideas. If, realizing that any such
justification is circular, they try to make the whole depend on something
outside itself, they fail, as indeed they must ; for since the historical
present includes in itself its own past, the real ground on which the whole
rests, namely the

(
230) past out of which it has grown, is not outside it but is included
within it.

If these systems remain valuable to posterity, that is not in spite of their
strictly historical character but because of it. To us, the ideas expressed in
them are ideas belonging to the past ; but it is not a dead past ; by
understanding it historically we incorporate it into our present thought, and
enable ourselves by developing and criticizing it to use that heritage for our
own advancement.

But a mere inventory of our intellectual possessions at the present time can
never show by what right we enjoy them. To do this there is only one way: by
analysing them instead of merely describing them, and showing how they have been
built up in the historical development of thought. What Kant, for example,
wanted to do when he set out to justify our use of a category like causation,
can in a sense be done ; but it cannot be done on Kant's method, which yields a
merely circular argument, proving that such a category can be used, and must be
used if we are to have Newtonian science ; it can be done by research into the
history of scientific thought. All Kant could show was that eighteenth-century
scientists did think in terms of that category; the question why they so thought
can be answered by investigating the history of the idea of causation. If more
than this is required ; if a proof is needed that the idea is true, that people
are right to think in that way ; then a demand is being made which in the nature
of things can never be satisfied. How can we ever satisfy ourselves that the
principles on which we think are true, except by going on thinking according to
those principles, and seeing whether unanswerable criticisms of them emerge as
we work ? To criticize the conceptions of science is the work of science itself
as it proceeds ; to demand that such criticism should be anticipated by the
theory of knowledge is to demand that such a theory should anticipate the
history of thought.

Finally, there is the question what function can be assigned to the science
of psychology. At first sight its position appears equivocal. On the one hand,
it claims to be a science of mind ; but if so, its apparatus of scientific
method is merely the fruit of a false analogy, and it must pass over into
history and, as such, disappear. And this is certainly what ought to happen so

(
231) far as psychology claims to deal with the functions of reason itself.
To speak of the psychology of reasoning, or the psychology of the moral self (to
quote the titles of two well-known books), is to misuse words and confuse
issues, ascribing to a quasi-naturalistic science a subject-matter whose being
and development are not natural but historical. But if psychology avoids this
danger and renounces interference with what is properly the subject-matter of
history, it is likely to fall back into a pure science of nature and to become a
mere branch of physiology, dealing with muscular and nervous movements.

But there is a third alternative. In realizing its own rationality, mind also
realizes the presence in itself of elements that are not rational. They are not
body ; they are mind, but not rational mind or thought. To use an old
distinction, they are psyche or soul as distinct from spirit. These irrational
elements are the subject-matter of psychology. They are the blind forces and
activities in us which are part of human life as it consciously experiences
itself, but are not parts of the historical process: sensation as distinct from
thought, feelings as distinct from conceptions, appetite as distinct from will.
Their importance to us consists in the fact that they form the proximate
environment in which our reason lives, as our physiological organism is the
proximate environment in which they live. They are the basis of our rational
life, though no part of it. Our reason discovers them, but in studying them it
is not studying itself. By learning to know them, it finds out how it can help
them to live in health, so that they can feed and support it while it pursues
its own proper task, the self-conscious creation of its own historical life.

Notes

'Historical criticism was born in the seventeenth century from the same
intellectual movement as the philosophy of Descartes.' E. Bréhier, in Philosophy and History: Essays presented to Ernst Cassirer
(Oxford, 1936), p. 160.

In the argument of this section I owe much to Mr. Alexander's admirable
essay on 'The Historicity of Things', in the volume on Philosophy and History
already quoted. If I seem to be controverting his main thesis, that is not
because I disagree with his argument or any part of it, but only because I mean
more than he does by the word 'historicity'. For him, to say that the world is
'a world of events' is to say that 'the world and everything in it is
historical'. For me, the two things are not at all the same.

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